Does buy happiness

It is a day of magnificent wonderfulness.

It has been a very quiet day on the taxi rank, so quiet that I had finished all the name-label sewing that I had to do by mid-afternoon. There are lots of people here, but it is warm and sunny and nice, and so they are all saying “no, let’s walk,” instead of getting in taxis.

I was very pleased with the name labels, it is a job over and done with now, and it is a visible demonstration of my parental virtue and lovingness, not that Oliver will notice, it is for the benefit of everybody else, I have never yet come across a child who said: “Gosh, how much you must love me, you have sewn a hundred and seventy eight labels in my school uniform and tapes for hanging up all my PE kit as well.”

I had just finished and folded everything up neatly and put it all away ready to be ironed when I go home, and was just looking happily at the sunshine and thinking that I might read my book for a bit, when the phone rang, and it was my parents.

They wanted to know our bank details, and then inexplicably but with huge generosity have placed a considerable sum of money in our bank.

It will cover the mortgage and the school fees, and made me cry.

My father said that they had too much money and were just getting rid of some excess, which of course is not true because if they had too much money I imagine they would be eating chocolates for their dinner off gold plates every night and champagne and wild salmon for breakfast, and having lilies and daffodils in all the rooms including the loo, and holidaying in the Azores and squirting themselves liberally all over with expensive perfumes after every bath night, which is what I would be doing if I had too much money. It is a simple act of charitable generosity towards the not-terribly-deserving poor, and I am astonished and mind-bogglingly grateful.

It means that the horrible terrifying problem of our lovely camper van being due for an MOT can be solved because Mark can go and spend some time welding patches onto the worst of the rust, and getting it fixed and making it beautiful again, instead of having to sit on the taxi rank all day and all night next week so that we can pay the school fees and the mortgage, and we will still have a camper van, and we can still go to Blackpool and to visit Number One Daughter and the children’s schools, and it will still work, and everything will be all right after all.

It means that we can shell a bit out to Numbers One and Two daughters, who I know are on their uppers at the moment.

It means that I soon I won’t need to turn the radio up when I put the taxi into third gear so that customers can’t hear the whine caused by the clutch and flywheel being on their way out. We can buy a clutch on Ebay and Mark can take the taxi all to bits in the shed at the farm and make it work properly again.

It means that the next time I get a taxi job up towards Windermere I can pop into the house and have a cup of coffee and hear all the stories told by the two newly-returned Intrepids, which I haven’t heard yet because I am sitting on the rank trying to pay the school fees and the mortgage instead of being at home complaining about their washing and the smell and the state of the dog and all the other things you say when you are pleased to see your husband back again.

It means that I won’t have to run round to the bank first thing on Monday morning, clutching the weekend’s takings to pay them in quickly, because Monday is the twentieth of the month, and everybody will have helped themselves to our money. I don’t at all mind about this, because I think having things like gas and electric light and water that comes out of taps at a temperature of your choice is such a magnificent magical thing that it is worth almost any price, although admittedly this didn’t stop me complaining like mad when I thought our electricity company had overcharged us. The gas bill is only six quid every month, on account of all the heating and everything being done by the stove, but since we only had £1.73 in the account when I got up this morning it was still way out of our price bracket.

I am not one for saying that other people are stupid or wrong as I think almost all ideas and philosophies have some merit if you understand them properly, but on this occasion I feel that it is time to utter an opinion.

Anybody who says that money can’t buy happiness is demonstrably an idiot, and this afternoon I am the living proof.

LATER NOTE: I have just spoken to Numbers One And Two Daughters and I can confirm that this is not an isolated phenomenon. We are all very happy indeed.